A recent Deloitte article published in the Wall Street Journal (accessible here) gives a great overview of the customer retention problem that many telecom companies are facing today. The challenge centers on how telecom companies attempt to personalize communications and identify which customers should be retained and which customers should be let go. The authors point out that while “telecom CMOs (are) increasingly seeing the ability to leverage customer data as a competitive differentiator, they need IT’s help sorting out the data mess. Unfortunately, in many telecom companies, IT lacks the speed and responsiveness marketing seeks.”
Telecom companies want to use the valuable customer data that they have curated for years, but are faced with the challenge of overcoming siloed data and organizational structures. While the authors suggest that the solution to this problem is a “More Perfect Union” between Marketing and IT, this is typically not a short term or low-cost solution – it likely involves extensive process re-engineering and months of change management to properly execute, all with the help of management consultants and change management experts.
While this may be a viable long-term solution for some companies, an alternative (cost effective) solution would be to use hosted managed service CCM providers. CCM service providers have extensive expertise in aggregating disparate data sources for the expressed purpose of improving the customer experience around communications, delivering targeted content to customers based on demographic and billing information.
Telecom companies can spend millions of dollars trying to build and manage the technology infrastructure required to support the type of customer retention program described by the authors, hoping to get it right. OR they can adopt a best of breed solution that could rapidly enable this capability with limited reliance on corporate IT.
About DataOceans
DataOceans offers customer communications management solutions that help companies across multiple industries improve existing customer communications, including billing and invoicing for print, portal, tablet and phone deliveries. These newly transformed customer communications can be implemented in 90-120 days without significant involvement of client IT resources and offer interactive experiences, personalization, and highly-targeted content with a focus on increasing revenue and decreasing costs.
Visit www.DataOceans.com for more information about the company and its products.